A new website is claiming to offer 'porn for women'. Dr Brooke Magnanti
takes a look and isn't turned on

Porn For Women, the hugely popular Instagram accountby Sarah Gidick that posts photos of nice-looking guys most certainly not having sex, is branching out into a website. Perusing the images, you'll find a host of familiar actors, interspersed with pics of bedroom-eyed hunks leaning against things a la Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life, only, you know, in unclipped dungarees and cuddling lambs on farms.

It's diverting, sure. But is it "porn"? The legion of feminist porn makers like Madison YoungandCourtney Troubleprobably wouldn't agree. Really, this isn't porn any more than having an extra low-fat biscuit is "treating yourself" or eating more than a mouthful of dessert is "naughty".

Variations on the theme have been around for ages: remember Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative, authors of the book Porn For Women? Their work largely consisted of images of fully clothed men dusting, washing dishes, and tidying up. Why? Because, according to the blurb, "A world where clothes get folded just so, delicious dinners await, and flatulence is just not that funny ... is porn that will leave women begging for more!" In other words, women couldn't possibly be turned on by images of sex, and what they really want is - a man maid?

That said, Amazon must think there is something genuinely subversive about this book, because it's excluded from main search results as "adult content". Fully clothed men. Hoovering. Adult content. Chew on that mystery for a while.

"Women have a sensory reaction when they see a photo of a hot man. It's the same idea as food porn or shoe porn. People are really enticed by it, and I think women get happy when they see a picture of a handsome man," Gidick said in Women's Wear Daily.

Meh. This occupies the same level of thinking about sex that the 1980s photocopies of "Better than Patrick Swayze" recipes handed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand aroused. (Spoiler: it's chocolate cake mix with sweetened condensed milk.) The very phrases "shoe porn" and "food porn" are laden with the assumptions that women - delicate ethereal creatures that we are - wouldn’t actually be turned on by something as simplistic as an image of an excited naked man… or would we? We’re used to thinking of men as being the visual ones. Women’s sexual response is a function not of physical lust but of emotional arousal, right?

Women’s desire has been ceded as a territory so unknown, it is presumed to exist only in the mind, and only in a state of emotional contentment. This is a stereotype that informs culture at so many levels that it's the work of a lifetime to unpick what we actually want from what we are told we should want. So instead of hot scenes of sex, women get domestic chores being served up as a suitable substitute for the naked body. "Porn" that basically, you wouldn't be too embarrassed if your teen daughter caught you watching, or vice-versa.

In tit-for-tat popular culture, it's deemed acceptable - and even desirable - to turn the tables and make the objectifier the objectified. I for one have no problem with that (your mileage may vary) but let's at least call it what it is: pretty pictures for those who have aged out of the boy band target audience.

While the popular assumption is that female desire is something unknowable, alchemical, difficult to pin down…increasing volumes of research in human sexuality is showing otherwise. The work of researchers like Dr Meredith Chivers, for example, demonstrating that women not only get turned on by porn, but they also get turned on by same-sex porn when they identify as straight, and vice-versa. Do women have a sensory reaction when they see hot actors, as Gidick claims? Of course, or else Ryan Gosling would be out of a job. But is it "porn"? Lady, don't make me laugh.